Friday, February 10, 2012

Newt Gingrich And Duking It Out

This
year, Newt Gingrich has run the most explicitly white supremacist campaign for
high public office since David Duke ran for governor of Louisiana in 1991. (For
more on Duke, a former Klansman turned politician and polemicist, see part
three of my essay, “How Did Blacks Become Democrats and Republicans Become
Racists?” elsewhere on this blog.)
Gingrich reached a low,
(though he would later out-Gingrich himself), in August 2011 when he
called Obama a “food stamp president.”
His full remarks were as follows:

"You
don't get out of 9.2% unemployment, you don't get out of -- today it was
announced [that] the largest number of Americans [are] on food stamps in
history. I've said now for six months, this is the most effective food stamp
President in history. That sounds like it is an attack, it's just a statement
of fact. It's just that his administration kills jobs. They are driving
Americans onto food stamps. Most Americans would rather have a
paycheck." (For more on these
comments, see http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2011/08/05/gingrich_obama_most_effective_food_stamp_president_in_history.html. )

This is a
clear example of racial code words.
For a long time, the American media has unfairly linked African
Americans and Latinos with dependency on welfare, food stamps, and other
government programs. The Yale
political scientist Martin Gilens analyzed in detail news content from major
print and electronic media from 1988-1994 and found that close to 100 percent
of the photographs in magazines like Time,
Newsweek, and U.S. News and World
Report portrayed the poor as being African
American and that 65 percent of all network television news stories about
welfare featured African Americans.
( See Gilens, Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media and the Politics
of Anti-Poverty Policy.) The idea of the black “welfare queen”
exploiting wrongheaded liberal social programs in order to avoid work and rip
off hard-toiling white taxpayers has been part of Republican racial mythology
since the 1970s. Ronald Reagan
concocted a phony story about a woman supposedly from the south side of Chicago
(an African American neighborhood) during his 1976 primary challenge to Gerald
Ford:

"She
has eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is
collecting veteran's benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she
is collecting Social Security on her cards. She's got Medicaid, getting food
stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free
cash income is over $150,000."

When
asked, Reagan could never produce the name of his “welfare queen” or any
evidence she existed. (For more on
this, see part three of my essay “Why Blacks Become Democrats.”) Nevertheless, Republicans believed the
story and have ever since. And it
has repeatedly proven a useful tall tale in motivating downwardly mobile,
disenfranchised white voters to show up on Election Day.

As one
scholar, Patricia Hill Collins put it, the prototypical welfare queen in this
narrative is “portrayed as being content to sit around and collect welfare,
shunning work and passing on her bad values to her offspring. The welfare mother represents a woman
of low morals and uncontrolled sexuality.” (See her 2008 book, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge,
Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment.) Republicans like Reagan
and Gingrich happily encourage angry white male supporters to use their ballot
to get even with the welfare queens by electing politicians who will cut off
their supposedly undeserved subsidies.

In 1996, at
the urging of then-House Speaker Gingrich, the Republican-controlled Congress passed the “Personal
Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act,” the so-called “welfare to work” law. Bill Clinton embraced the
conservative legislation as part of his effort to prove he was a “new
Democrat” not beholden to the
party’s old liberal shibboleths.
The law ended welfare as an entitlement and, among other provisions,
placed a five-year lifetime cap on welfare benefits. The legislation slashed welfare rolls, but many women
receiving aid were single mothers who, once cut off from assistance, were
unable to afford day care even as they were forced into low-wage jobs that
forced them to be away from their children. Such mothers found themselves denied aid at the same
time that their miserable wages made it impossible to meet demanding monthly
budgets.

Following
passage of the law, University of California at Los Angeles political scientist
Franklin D. Gilliam wanted to test how white audiences reacted emotionally to televised
images of black women portrayed as relying on public aid. Gilliam created tapes of simulated news
broadcasts and showed them to audiences.
As he describes the experiment:

“[T]he
only difference between what two groups of viewers saw involved images of race
and gender. Participants watched
one of four television news stories about the impact of welfare reform on a
woman named Rhonda Germaine. In
the story that we created for our experimental news broadcast, Rhonda worries
about the impact of the new welfare on her ability to care for her
children. A still picture of
Rhonda appears at two points in the story: each time it appears, it remains on
the screen for five seconds.

“Our
viewers were randomly assigned to four groups. The first watched this news story with Rhonda cast as a
white woman. The second group saw
the same story with Rhonda depicted as an African American woman. The third group watched the welfare
story without seeing any visual representation of Rhonda. The final was a control group that did
not watch any TV news broadcast about welfare.”

The two women portraying Rhonda were
dressed the same way and both were overweight. Among the white respondents, 80 percent correctly recalled
having seen the face of the African American Rhonda. Fewer than half remembered having seen the picture of the
white Rhonda. Whites grew
more hostile to welfare and to African Americans when exposed to the story
about the black Rhonda. As Gilliam writes,

“[Exposure
to the story about the black Rhonda] increased opposition to welfare spending
[by white audience members surveyed afterwards] by five percent and showed a 10
percent rise in attribution of cause [for poverty] to individual failings. Likewise, white participants who
watched the welfare story with the black Rhonda were more likely to hold
negative views of African Americans than those who didn’t have a visual
cue.” (see Gilliam, “The
‘Welfare Queen Experiment’: How Viewers React to Images of African American
Mothers on Welfare,” Neiman Reports,
The Neiman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, Vol. 53., No. 2,
Summer 1999. This article is
available at http://escholarship.org/uc/item/17m7r1rq#page-1)

Politicians market test in advance
every syllable they plan to utter before the public. A politician who has always thrived on social divisions,
Gingrich was well aware of the deep psychological associations his consistently
monochromatic white audiences would have if they heard the phrase “food stamps”
associated with an African American president. Gingrich knew his listeners would believe that dependency on
food stamps is a uniquely black dysfunction, and that a black president had
made the number of people relying on this costly “socialist” program skyrocket.

So what are the facts about Obama
and food stamps? First of all,
food stamp usage went up in the past five years because of an history-making
recession that took place under Republican President George W. Bush. More people enrolled in the food stamp
program under Bush than have so far under Obama, according to the non-partisan
FactCheck.Org website.
As the curators note, the recession began in October 2007 (and Bush
didn’t leave office until January 2009.)
In the year before Obama took office, 4.4. million people were added to
the national food stamp rolls, a tripling of the 1.4 million added in
2007. As they write at
FactCheck.Org:

“[U]nder President George
W. Bush the number of recipients rose by nearly 14.7 million. Nothing before
comes close to that.

“And under Obama, the increase so
far has been 14.2 million. To be exact, the program has so far grown by 444,574
fewer recipients during Obama’s time in
office than during Bush’s.” And,
as the recession has eased off in the Obama years, the number of food stamp
recipients has declined. Food
stamp rolls dropped by 43,528 this
past October.

More
important to this blog is the white perception of who is on food stamps. Most are not the black “welfare queen”
derided and despised in GOP myth.
In fact, children represent the largest number of recipients – 47
percent. According to the
Department of Agriculture, 41 percent of those receiving food stampsx have jobs
– they are the “working poor” whose serf-like wages are not adequate to pay
grocery bills. The USDA
estimates that only 22 percent of food stamp recipients are African
Americans. The largest group
receiving food stamps? Whites, at
36 percent. (About 10 percent are
Hispanic.)

Because there
is no requirement that recipients filling out application forms for food stamp
assistance identify their race, almost 19 percent are classified as “race
unknown.” Based on food stamp data obtained by the U.S. Census Bureau, the USDA
greatly underestimates the number of whites receiving food stamps. The Census estimates that 49 percent of
recipients are white, 26 percent are black, and 23 percent are Hispanic. (see
http://www.factcheck.org/2012/01/newts-faulty-food-stamp-claim/)

In short,
George W. Bush is the “food stamp president.” The “welfare queen” is more than likely a single white women
in a Southern state like Newt Gingrich’s Georgia. And Gingrich is a shameless racial demagogue, trading in
hateful and deceptive stereotypes to win votes from the most uninformed of
bigots.

“The
Current is Stronger’: Images of Racial Oppression and Resistance in North Texas
Black Art During the 1920s and 1930s ” in Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D.
Wintz, eds., The Harlem Renaissance in the West: The New Negroes’ Western
Experience (New York:
Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2011)

“Dallas,
1989-2011,” in Richardson Dilworth, ed. Cities in American Political History (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2011)

(With
John Anthony Moretta and Keith J. Volanto), Keith J. Volonto and Michael
Phillips, eds., The American Challenge: A New History of the United States, Volume II. (Wheaton, Il.: Abigail Press,
2012).

“Texan by
Color: The Racialization of the Lone Star State,” in David Cullen and Kyle
Wilkison, eds., The Radical Origins of the Texas Right (College Station: University of Texas
Press, 2013).

He
is currently collaborating, with longtime journalist Betsy Friauf, on a history
of African American culture, politics and black intellectuals in the Lone Star
State called God Carved in Night: Black Intellectuals in Texas and the World
They Made.

No comments:

Followers

About Me

I received my Ph.D. in history from the University of Texas at Austin. My first book, "White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2001," won the Texas State Historical Commission's T.R. Fehrenbach Award for best work on Texas history in 2007. My second book, "The House Will Come to Order: How the Texas Speaker Became a Power in State and National Politics" will be published by the University of Texas Press March 1, 2010.
My beautiful boy Dominic was born on May 30, 2003. He's an avid reader and loves Harry Potter and Star Wars.
I am a frustrated political liberal, holding Democrats in contempt but too suspicious about the competence of the Green Party to make the leap.
I am married to a wonderful woman named Betsy Friauf who was my editor at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram 20 years ago. We will be writing books together.
My only appointment television is "The Daily Show," "The Colbert Report" and "Countdown with Keith Olbermann." I also love to cook when I have the time.